How Apple wins for enterprise IT

It hasn’t been that long since Apple had no status at all in enterprise IT. Its products were used in some creative departments and at home, but that’s as far as things went. The iPod and iPhone changed all that, even while general exposure to powerful mobile tech transformed perceptions around what to expect from the tools you use at work.

The Apple user experience is the company’s biggest not-so-secret weapon, and it is interesting that even decades since the first PCs appeared, Apple still delivers intuitive user experiences  people enjoy using.

Consumer simple, enterprise ready

Those user experiences have generated expectations, and as my old chum Dean Hager, former Jamf CEO liked to describe it, people entering the workplace wanted the systems they used there to be as easy and intuitive to understand as the Apple products they used elsewhere. Apple’s user experience eventually became something incoming enterprise employees expected — many would simply quit their job if they were using crummier tech at work than they were at home.

At the end of the day, Apple won the enterprise one consumer user at a time.

But the other piece to Apple’s success is that organizations that have deployed Apple products at scale have experienced significant improvements on their bottom line. Multiple reports tell us employees are happier using Apple products, they’re more productive using Apple products, and spend less on tech support on Apple products than on PCs. Staff retention rates improve even as productivity grows — and the reduced tech support costs make life easier for IT and dramatically reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of an Apple fleet. 

How Apple wins for enterprise IT

None of this came easy. Apple had to take its basic product (the Mac) and its OS X operating system and figure out how to best apply that tech to mobile devices. That’s what we began to get with the iPod and saw in living Technicolor with the iPhone; Apple took the power of computing and placed it inside the device you always have with you – your phone.

Of course, the ability to run more complex applications on your iPhone made it possible for employees to get more work done using the device, which spawned the Bring Your Own Device wave that really began to express itself around 2010.

Not only did employees want to be able to use the same platform at work as at home, but they also wanted to use the same mobile devices at work as at home. The biggest evidence of that was the abject failure of Windows Mobile as it showed people didn’t want to use the same PC they used at work in their mobile existences; they remained hooked on experience Apple’s ease-of-use. 

They did then. 

They do now.

The evidence is everywhere

You can see this is the direction of travel each time you read yet another report explaining Apple’s growing enterprise sales across all of its products, or the fast-proliferating number of Very Large Indeed Apple deployments at giant global companies. Not to mention that once employee choice schemes are put in place, the majority of employees seem to prefer Apple to any other platform. While it’s still early days on spatial computing, we can already see Vision Pro devices staking spaces across key industries as Apple takes what was once more or less the Mac experience and makes it both ambient and hyper-mobile.

Spatial computing isn’t just about computing that surrounds you, it’s about computing that takes you there.

Along this journey, Apple has thought deeply about what it offers and attempted to take down barriers to enterprise deployment. That’s why the company provides APIs for Mobile Device Management; that’s why it has high-grade security features I’m certain the company’s own CEO also uses, such as Lockdown Mode; that’s also why it remains so deeply committed to delivering regular software and hardware updates, so no enterprise professionals find themselves left insecure or abandoned on their workplace tech journey. 

Want to do more? You can, thanks to the company’s’ rich set of developer tools, which provide a robust environment for enterprise development and integration. 

Support and updates

The fact that Apple’s hardware is reliable is also good for enterprise sales. Coupled with annual software updates that bring sometimes-exciting new features, user engagement remains high throughout the usable life of these devices, which now usually extends to an easy five years. Once that time is up, the resilience and reliability of the devices means they still fetch good value in the second-user markets; most major purchasers might also draw reassurance that the recycling and salvaging of the products will have some impact on their own carbon targets. 

Enterprises also like reliability for another reason, it helps them plan ahead. 

Not only do they know that it is unlikely Apple will make too many major changes (though we do experience smaller ones), but they also know that unlike Windows 11, you will not wake one morning to find your PC has been updated to a new operating system without consent. These little communications do count, particularly if you are running several hundred systems in your fleet. You also cannot ignore the impact of the CrowdStrike debacle on that lovely feeling of peace and calm enterprises perhaps enjoyed before it took place.

Apple’s platform security may not be something we can take for granted any longer, but it still exists — and while it makes sense to stay watchful, it remains unmatched. Its major software updates remain free (at least until regulators utterly wreck the company’s business). That’s always an easy budget line item at the end of the day. 

What Apple gets wrong

It is interesting, given all that it gets right, the extent to which critics like to focus on what Apple gets wrong. Some of the most common criticisms could translate into easy wins for Apple: Yes, I think it should provide more in-depth granular information to assist enterprise IT deployments, but I would also argue that its free certification courses remain the best possible way to find the answers you need to begin managing larger or newer Apple deployments. Those courses are free, well-constructed and give you a thorough grounding for this work. Though I would really like Apple to give Configurator the power to register multiple devices at once – and a little more automation would come in useful to a lot of admins, particularly in the education sector. 

But what’s super-interesting about so many of the criticisms made around Apple in the enterprise is that they tend toward being smaller, more granular problems that the company could conceivably resolve once it stops pouring all of its R&D resources into AI development. 

And that’s my point, really — to quietly point out that the nature of the criticisms Apple’s current enterprise solutions receive actually reflect how successfully it has penetrated the sector. It is now being asked to solve really complex questions that reflect the myriad complexities of enterprise IT requirements. It won’t solve all of them overnight, but its progress in the sector since earlier this century suggests it will probably get around to resolving many of them, one challenge at a time.

And, rest assured, while Apple never speaks about it, I’m confident that the company does actually read criticism; it just needs to be selective concerning which challenges to solve first. And at times it must also consider whether those challenges will still be relevant a few years as tech deployment requirements change.

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